I. The game

It started in a poker game, which is the only part of this everybody in the family tells the same way.

A wagon camp, somewhere west of nowhere. The wagons pulled into a ring, the fire down to coals, and five card draw going on the tailgate of a Conestoga by lantern light. The first Bonifay was not a gambler. He was a man with a skillet and a habit of feeding whoever sat down next to him, and that is the only reason he was in the game at all.

By midnight one man had lost his money, then his mule, then his boots. He had one thing left and he said so out loud. He said his mother's people had cooked with it since before Texas was Texas, and that a man who tasted it once would follow him home.

Nobody at that fire believed him. Everybody at that fire called.

He turned over a wanted poster he had been tearing up for kindling, wrote the whole thing out on the blank side in pencil, and pushed it into the pot.

Nobody remembers what he was holding. Everybody remembers what he was not.

He was gone before daylight. No one on that train ever got his name, and no one ever found the country his people cooked in, which is why it is a lost recipe and not a family one. The Bonifays did not inherit it. They won it, fair, off a man who bet the only thing he had left.

II. What it did to him

He was an ordinary sized man until he started cooking off that poster.

The chiles came first. He planted a row where the lightning had hit and got something back that had to be picked with fence pliers. He dried them on the roof. Birds would not come near the place for two years, which he considered a feature.

Then he built the pot. It took a winter and most of a wagon. He stirred it with a cottonwood trunk, and the dragging of that spoon across the country is how Palo Duro got its canyon. He was not trying to make a canyon. He was trying to keep the beans off the bottom.

He lost the lid once and went looking for it. That is why the Llano Estacado is flat.

The brisket he is remembered for went on at sunup and came off the following spring. He fed that fire everything the Panhandle had standing, which is the reason there are no trees up there now, and the reason the coals are still glowing outside Marfa. People drive out at night to look at them. He would have been pleased and would not have said so.

III. The bandana

The bandana was never about hiding. Grinding that much dried chile fills a room with a red dust that will find a man's lungs and stay there, so he tied a bandana over his face and left it on. People saw a masked man coming out of a red cloud on a horse and drew their own conclusions.

They put up posters. He was wanted in four counties, and every sheriff who read the charges out loud had to stop and start over, because the only thing the man had ever taken was seasoning. He held up the Del Rio stage, went through every strongbox on it, and rode off with a tin of salt, and left a dollar on the seat, which was more than the salt was worth.

The reward got up to a hundred dollars. He collected it himself, in Ozona, on a Tuesday. He walked in, put his hat on the desk, and asked to be paid in jars.

He never copied the recipe onto anything better. He said paper that had already been a lie once was the right place to keep something true, so he folded that poster into the crown of his hat, and he kept the hat on.